A Busy Art Day

Today we had the privilege of working with two special guests to our school.  The first guest we met was Daina, an actor/mime who is working with us as our spring artist for The Integrated Arts (TIA).  

Daina introduced us to several different games where we practiced doing a variety of things with our voices and bodies.  We began by playing a name game.  Daina showed us an invisible ball that we would be passing around.  The only thing you could say was your name, and this only happened when you caught the ball.  Our next activity was using our voices.  We had to say "Today is Tuesday" (even though it's really Monday), trying to express an emotion.  We first were annoyed and then excited.  Next we warmed up our bodies.  We pretended we were a variety of different things, bugs, birds, rain puddles, and clouds, and moved around and acted as if we were these things.  This was a lot of fun.

Daina is primarily working with us in the artistic medium of mime so we had the opportunity to play and practice several different miming activities.  We pretended that we had to push against a heavy wall, we looked through a window, opened and closed that window, and then we were artists, building sculptures of things we saw through our window when we looked into a forest.  The very last activity of the day was creating our own forest.  Each student chose a plant or animal and became their object.

Here are some pictures of us during her visit.  If you click on them, they enlarge.

Unfortunately, some of us found it very challenging to follow the directions that Daina was providing and were not treating her or our classmates respectfully.  As a class we recognized that this is not how we want a guest in our school to be treated.  We want them to feel that we are respectful and kind and want to work with us again.  Since Daina is returning to work with us on Wednesday and Friday, we decided to write her an apology letter from our class.  We all signed it and will be giving it to her when we see her Wednesday morning.

This afternoon we had another opportunity to work with a special guest artist.  Michael ManyEagles, worked with us, teaching us how to carve soapstone.  We all had a chance to make a feather/leaf necklace and then we received another piece of soapstone to make whatever we wanted.  It was dusty, but fun!  Some of us had had a chance to work with him in the past, but for many of us this was our first experience working in this medium.  We learned to file the soapstone to make it into the shapes we wanted, then we had to buff it to get all the marks off and make it smooth, and the last step was to carve a design on the feather.  Michael helped us put a hole in our carving.  We all had a lot of fun!  One of the neat things we learned was that the powder from soapstone is what they use to make baby powder!  They just add perfume and they are done.  So we all had very soft hands.